When you walk in the front door of my home, this is the view as you look up into the foyer. It's a opening. A large opening. To what should be the fourth wall in boys bedroom. They've lived with this for two years because, frankly, it was a rental house and we didn't want to put the time or money into fixing it.

The foyer view from upstairs

This is the view looking down from their room (forgive the mess, we had already started taking the ledge down!). The doorway to the right is the kitchen. The large opening is to the dining room and family room. To the left, which you can't see, are the stairs to the second story, and behind that, the laundry room. What this means for my boys is that all the sound from the house basically travels up directly to their room. As if that wasn't bad enough, the window over the front door means that if we have the porch light or the foyer light on, it keeps them up. As do the lights from the kitchen or dining room if we're up past their bed time. Then there's the issue with climate control. Their bedroom is on the sunny side of the house for afternoon sun. We've installed faux wood blinds to help block it out, but that huge opening prevents their room from actually cooling down from the a/c vent, as well as allowing all the heat that travels up to go directly into their room. Saying this was poor planning on someones part is an understatement!

So our first official projects as homeowners was to fill in that hole!!

It really wasn't difficult. We spent about $50 in supplies, including the insulation we decided we needed for noise reduction purposes. The Builder framed out the opening as it was. I thought he would open up those two slanted walls, but he assured me it would make no difference overall. He then carefully leaned through each framing and fit a piece of drywall that that he cut to size (photo 4), until the entire opening on the outside was done. Next we cut pieces of insulation to fit the the space. It was a quick process to fill in the drywall over the insulation. I think this main portion, including floating a coat of mud over the wall, took about 4 hours.

We're not actually done. We still want to float one more coat of mud to make sure the seams he taped up are good and covered, as wells put a light coat of texture on the wall to match the rest of the bedroom. And he needs to borrow the scaffold from work so we can mud and paint the foyer, which still looks exactly like it does in photo 5. But my boys are thrilled that the sound issue is gone, their room stays cool when the a/c is on, and they have more privacy!

Then it will be on to the really fun portion of this - decorating their room!!